Events

Past Events

On Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The Library of Congress marked the 155th anniversary of this historic speech with a one-day celebration, featuring a pop-up exhibit of the earliest known draft of the speech, and a Letters to Lincoln transcribe-a-thon for volunteers on and off site! For more info, check out our challenge guide.

A series of workshops External organized in 2018 and 2019, as part of the DARIAH-DESIR project External. The conference aimed to initiate collaborations and to exchange knowledge and experience in digital scholarship on an international level. Conference sessions focused on digital newspapers and text analysis, web archives, and public humanities. This is the second of three DARIAH dissemination workshops: the first workshop took place at Stanford University in September 2018, and the third workshop will take place in March 2019 in Adelaide, Australia.

This workshop introduced attendees to text analysis research and the common methods and tools used in this emerging area of scholarship, with particular attention to the HathiTrust Research Center. It provided a framework for how the library can support text data mining, as well as transferable skills useful for many other areas of digital scholarly inquiry. Topics included: intro to gathering, managing, analyzing, and visualizing textual data; hands-on experience with text analysis tools, including the HTRC's off-the-shelf algorithms, datasets, and using the command line to run basic text analysis processes. Contact [email protected] if you have questions, and learn more about the project here External.

JSTOR Labs and the Library of Congress demoed prototypes, tools, visualizations, and other outcomes of our week-long user-centered flash build using items from our digital baseball collections andthose from the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The event also featured a panel discussion with ESPN’s Clinton Yates, mathematician Jordan Ellenberg, and baseball historian Rob Ruck on America’s pastime and its relationship to cultural memory and shared history. Check out the tool we built - Mapping an Americna Pastime.

2018 IIIF Conference May 21st-25th, 2018, Washington DC

The 2018 International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF) Conference was held May 21-25 in Washington, DC, co-hosted by the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Folger Shakespeare Library. The Conference was intended for a wide range of participants and interested parties, including digital image repository managers, content curators, software developers, scholars, and administrators at libraries, museums, cultural heritage institutions, software firms, and other organizations working with digital images and audio/visual materials. The agenda is posted here http://iiif.io/event/2018/washington/External.

The data artist Jer Thorp is our current Innovator-in-Residence. He has demonstrated creative ways of encountering the Library of Congress' collections through color and time, and even produced the podcast Artist in the Archive External, exploring items and processes at the Library through interviews with staff. Jer recorded a live episode of his podcast in front of a small audience. Click here for the archived livestream.

NDI led planning efforts for the 2018 Code4Lib conference, an annual gathering of technologists from around the world, who largely work for and with libraries, archives, and museums and have a commitment to open technologies. For access to the livestream and presentations from this event, see the conference website External.

To advance knowledge sharing, documentation, and promotion of best practices for long-term sustainability and interoperability of digital architecture, design and engineering (ADE) assets for design and the built environment, the Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art and the Architect of the Capitol will host a day-long symposium offering thematic discussions on these challenging topics. With contributions from various stakeholders in the ADE communities, including content creators and the caretakers, topics could include the development and implementation of open standardized file formats; case study discussions on current projects and practices, and creation of viable project deliverable specifications for new-build ADE assets. The goals of the symposium include community building, identifying common issues and challenges, and information sharing. Outcomes from this meeting will include a report with recommendations for future work. See the website for more information.

DC History for All September 23rd, 2017, Anacostia Community Museum

Experience Washington, D.C. and history firsthand with DC History for All Day at Anacostia Community Museum. Meet staff and volunteers from cultural heritage and history organizations located in and focusing on the capitol city. DC History for All Day is a free, inclusive event and seeks to bring together those interested in history and Washington, D.C. Join us for a front row view of opportunities to join volunteering initiatives at the U.S. National Archives, the Library of Congress, DC Public Library, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Ford’s Theatre, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Smithsonian Institution… then contribute to and make your own history!

Collections as Data: IMPACT July 25th 2017, Library of Congress

More relevant, more accessible, more visual, and more useful--these are some benefits of making digital collections available as data and ready for computational analysis. The Library of Congress hosted a day-long event that featured case-studies and impact stories of applying digital methods to analyzing and sharing collections. Presenters shared how using collections as data reactivates the holdings of libraries and other centers of history and art to make deeper connections to the communities they serve.

A learning hackathon in partnership with George Mason and George Washington University Libraries. Over the two days, attendees used low or no-cost computational tools to explore four library collection as data sets.

Software Carpentry February 15-16th 2017, Library of Congress

We hosted a Software Carpentry workshop with instructors Mark Laufersweiler and Mark Stacey of the University of Oklahoma, inviting staff from the Library, the DC Public Library and federal libraries for hands-on learning in the programming language Python, the version-control software Git, and the command-line interface Bash.

Collections as Data: Stewardship and Use Models to Enhance Access September 27th 2016, Library of Congress

The rise of accessible digital collections coupled with the development of tools for processing and analyzing data has enabled researchers to create new models of scholarship and inquiry. The National Digital Initiatives team invited leaders and experts from organizations that are collecting, preserving and providing researcher access to digital collections as data to share best practices and lessons learned. This event will also highlight new collaborative initiatives at the Library of Congress that seek to enhance researcher engagement and the use of digital collections as data.